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Children Bound to Labor
The history of early America cannot be told without considering unfree labor. At the center of this history are African and Native American adults forced into slavery; the children born to these unfree persons usually inherited their parents' status. Immigrant indentured servants, many of whom were young people, are widely recognized as part of early American society. Less familiar is the idea of free children being taken from the homes where they were born and put into bondage.
AsChildren Bound to Labormakes clear, pauper apprenticeship was an important source of labor in early America. The economic, social, and political development of the colonies and then the states cannot be told properly without taking them into account. Binding out pauper apprentices was a widespread practice throughout the colonies from Massachusetts to South Carolina-poor, illegitimate, orphaned, abandoned, or abused children were raised to adulthood in a legal condition of indentured servitude. Most of these children were without resources and often without advocates. Local officials undertook the responsibility for putting such children in family situations where the child was expected to work, while the master provided education and basic living needs.
The authors ofChildren Bound to Laborshow the various ways in which pauper apprentices were important to the economic, social, and political structure of early America, and how the practice shaped such key relations as master-servant, parent-child, and family-state in the young republic. In considering the practice in English, Dutch, and French communities in North America from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century,Children Bound to Laboreven suggests that this widespread practice was notable as a positive means of maintaining social stability and encouraging economic development.
eBook
Children bound to labor
Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- OVERVIEWS -- \"A Proper and Instructive Education\" -- Recreating Proper Families in England and North America -- BINDING OUT AS A MASTER/SERVANT RELATION -- \"Proper\" Magistrates and Masters -- Orphans in City and Countryside in Nineteenth-Century Maryland -- Bound Out from the Almshouse -- BINDING OUT AS A PARENT/CHILD RELATION -- Preparing Children for Adulthood in New Netherland -- Mothers and Children in and out of the Charleston Orphan House -- The Extent and Limits of Indentured Children's Literacy in New Orleans, 1809-1843 -- \"To Train Them to Habits of Industry and Usefulness\" -- BINDING OUT AS A FAMILY/STATE RELATION -- Responsive Justices -- The Stateless and the Orphaned among Montreal's Apprentices, 1791-1842 -- Apprenticeship Policy in Virginia -- Reflections on the Demand and Supply of Child Labor in Early America -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index.
Publication
Contested Bodies
It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children.
Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica,Contested Bodiesreveals enslaved women's contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources-including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence-Contested Bodiesyields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.
eBook
'When I Think of It I Awfully Dread It': Conceptualizing Childbirth Pain in Early America
The emergence of obstetric anesthesia in the second half of the nineteenth century was preceded by a transformation in the medical conceptualization of women's pain. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, physicians described pain in physiological terms as natural and unproblematic, but in the second half of the nineteenth century they adopted a newly emotional language that emphasized women's subjective experiences of suffering. Middle-class and elite white women shaped this transition by insisting that their physical and emotional anguish was extreme. Women's attitudes, combined with a growing perception that sensibility to pain was a marker of \"civilization,\" pushed physicians to view suffering as real and problematic. As they began to depict pain relief as an urgent medical concern, physicians envisioned refined white women as the primary beneficiaries of their new technology; this perspective paved the way for the increasingly routine use of anesthesia for middle-class and elite white women.
Journal Article
Brought to Bed
Based on personal accounts by birthing women and their medical attendants, Brought to Bed reveals how childbirth has changed from colonial times to the present.Judith Walzer Leavitt's study focuses on the traditional woman-centered home-birthing practices, their replacement by male doctors, and the movement from the home to the hospital.
eBook
Maternity, Midwifery, and Ministers: The Puritan Origins of American Obstetrics
In accounting for the rapid development of American obstetrics as a hegemonic profession, we tend to locate a rupture in the eighteenth century that was brought about by the importation of European technologies, such as the forceps, but in fact the groundwork for such dramatic change was laid in advance of these developments, and within the context of gendered power struggles. The tools that found their way into the hands of male surgeons (and stayed out of the hands of female midwives) heralded the decline of midwifery in America and the dawning of an age of highly medicalized childbirth; as I argue, the forceps in particular enabled an unprecedented level of intervention on the part of birth attendants who were sometimes seeking happier outcomes, and sometimes just trying to hurry things up.
Journal Article
A Short History of Occupational Health
The article provides a comprehensive overview of the history of occupational health in Europe & the US as an area of political, economic, & medical concern. The author stresses the social & economic effects of the Industrial Revolution as well as the accompanying philosophical movements advocating humanization of the workplace & the formation of labor unions. Hence, both capitalist & progressive agendas in the 19th & 20th centuries produced the broad concern with the maintenance of a healthy workforce. The author examines a variety of contemporary literature on such matters as child labor, class-based health disparities, workers compensation, the labor movement, & the role of women in the workforce. He concludes by considering the future of occupational health, underscoring the necessity of continuing to address the issues of safety rights, work-related illnesses, environmental hazards, & social problems that affect mental as well as physical well-being. 1 Figure, 94 References. K. Coddon
Journal Article
History Repeats Itself: Child Labor in Latin America
Child labor occurs on almost every continent in the world. Very few countries seem to escape this exploitative phase as they develop into fully industrialized countries. Child labor began during the eighteenth century in Great Britain and it continues in the twenty-first century in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Honduras. This paper offers an explanation for the persistence of child labor through history. The increase in the employment of children during industrialization is caused by an increase in the supply of children from poor and working-class families and an increase in the demand for child labor by the factory owners. Parents trapped in poverty have no other choice but to send their children off to work to contribute to the family income. Children's wages, moreover, often make the difference between starvation and survival. Employers are happy to oblige the parents because children are more productive than adults in the new industrial regimen. As the principle of the division of labor has been applied to the production process, unskilled children replace skilled adults in factories, mills, and mines. Children are preferred to adults because they are cheap, submissive, uneducated and nimble. These economic forces are so strong that neither child labor laws nor mandatory schooling legislation are an effective deterrent against employers or families. Since history is repeating itself in the developing world by industrializing on the backs of children, alternative policies are recommend to cut this stage short so that the future generations of Latin America will become educated instead of exploited. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
Diets Versus Diseases: The Anthropometrics of Slave Children
What were the living standards of American slaves? According to Robert W. Fogel and Stanley Engerman in their monumental study, Time on the Cross, the material standard of living of slaves compared favorably with that of other nineteenth-century agricultural laborers. More recently, utilizing anthropometric data that allow them to construct ageheight profiles for slaves, economic historians have cast doubts upon this view as it applies to particular age cohorts. They question the validity of the earlier assessment of living standards as it applies to slave newborns, infants, and children.
Journal Article